APB Review

Running around in your underwear has never been so dangerous.

The items you get have no bearing on matchmaking or threat level, beyond that it'll probably improve your killing ability and, over time, make you a greater threat. What this means is that players can potentially have very good gear, lose a string of missions, and then you'll be unlucky enough to face them and be torn to shreds. Your faction and agent levels are tracked externally through your "rating", which simply shows how much of the game you've completed, which also doesn't factor into matchmaking, although it perhaps ought to.

There's a whole other system separate to threat and faction levels, called "prestige" for enforcers and "infamy" for criminals. Doing bad things as a criminal will level your infamy up to a maximum of four, at which point only PvP activities will push it to its absolute high of five. Enforcers must do good deeds and perform arrests/complete missions/kill criminals to push their prestige level up. The higher the meter, the greater the rewards for any action you perform, but the tougher your matched opponents may be. Once you reach the zenith, a bounty is put on your head and you are suddenly fair game for everyone. Rewards at level five are insanely good, but it is near-impossible to maintain for very long. Slowly building towards that peak provides good short term goals for players, and is the driving force behind how criminals and enforcers play differently. It works well, though I felt a little dirty for killing helpless civilians just to raise my infamy level.

"Woah, dude, that car's going so fast it's on fire"

I personally found playing as an enforcer more fun. Being discouraged from ramming through hydrants, signs and people meant that my driving had to be more precise, and I enjoyed the added challenge of performing arrests instead of standard kills. Ramming through everything in my path as a criminal simply felt too sloppy and unnecessarily gruesome for my personal tastes.

Purchasing APB comes with 50 hours of game time, although I found myself getting bored and frustrated at the repetition by about hour 20. There are activities besides the missions to perform, but they're all of very little consequence and aren't particularly fun. APB needs more than two city areas, or at the very least alternate activities (hidden collectibles that serve as an instance-wide capture-the-flag, for example), in order to keep a player's attention longer.

The Verdict

Maybe you&#Array;re the kind of person who can play the same Counterstrike map for hours and hours, and you won&#Array;t mind paying a little extra every so often for persistent character growth and maps that are much larger than normal. I&#Array;m not that person. APB was fun, but not for long enough to warrant me to buy more time, or to even use all of what came with the game. If, six months from now, a great deal of content has been added to the game, then APB may be a great buy. For now, it&#Array;s stuck in limbo.